The Curiosity (41 page)

“Perfect,” I said, though I had no intention of obeying. I was their quarry, I would lure them away from her. “Excellent.”

Then she drew near, as if she knew my mind, and curled into my embrace. Kate seemed so small then, warm and close. Yet I could feel my heart pounding against her, exhaustingly fast. Her ear was right there on my chest . . . she had to know.

“Kate, I hope I have not been a . . . some kind of a . . . what is the word?” Language flailed in my mind like fish netted and dropped on a ship's deck. “A bad thing, then. I hope I am not a bad thing that happened to you.” I pressed her hand, as if the force of my squeeze would express what words could not. “I did not ask for this. I meant no one any trouble. You, Kate, of all people. I meant you no harm.”

She leaned back to look at me. Her eyes were glistening. “Be assured, Jeremiah.” She reached up to caress my face. “You have caused me no harm.”

What a moment we shared then, holding one another, silent and still. A few seconds only, yet they were as rich as the entire time since my awakening. But there was a twitch in my face, under her hand. Then a huge tremor climbed my frame, from my toes to the sky, like the deepest shudder.

I stepped away. She stood straight, regarding me with calm. What more could I say? How might I express everything I felt? My hands leaped and jerked like injured birds, and I slapped them against my chest to keep them still. But they continued, wandering over my person, trembling, until my fingers fastened on just the thing. Yes. Yes. They wrapped around it on my jacket like an organ grinder's monkey grasps a coin.

At that moment I heard more doors slamming. A child's voice cried out, “Over there, I saw them go down there.”

Kate looked away, then back. “You need to hide.”

“You mean
we
need to hide.”

“Yes, of course.” She took my face in both her hands, and she kissed me. It was her breath I experienced more than her lips, somehow, the awareness of her living self against me. Incomparable, and then it was over. “Now go.”

It took only an instant. I yanked hard on my coat, I tore the object free, I pressed it into her palm. Peering over the hull, I saw a reporter hastening down the pier.

“A button?” Kate said. “I don't understand.”

“You will,” I answered, moving away down the dock.

The reporter reached the gate and rattled it against the lock. I knew it would not delay him long. I turned, and I ran.

M
y feet are like wings, they barely strike the dock; I hold my arms wide for balance. There, after the last sailboat, floats a dinghy as if provided by God, eight feet of aluminum with two rough oars. Not until I have clambered aboard and unknotted the line does it occur to me that I am committing a crime. I vow to make restitution if I return, but an honest man knows a dishonest deed. The irony of it: Judge Rice perpetrating a theft.

In ten pulls of the oars I am among moored sailboats, hopefully a sight no paparazzi could fail to see. To those jackals I must be like knotted string to a cat, the tease they cannot help but follow. I know the open Atlantic, my escape, lies to the north. It would be in that direction, wouldn't it? North again, as though it were predestined. I remove my coat and toss it in the bow, then check the sky for direction. With that, I set my trusty boots against the other seat, draw hard on those oars, and begin working my way unconcealed across the harbor. I sight the rocks over my right shoulder, then face astern whilst concentrating on north, north.

Rowing calms my hands. One pull at a time I am leaving the harbor, leaving what a harbor is, leaving what harbor means. My mind navigates through harbors of all kinds that I have left, beautiful protections, quiet anchorages in the past and the here and now.

Settling into the exertion of it. Surely they've spotted me by now. And what is life but a little row in a small boat, every moment leaving what we know, every stroke unable to see where we are headed?

Wash of water under the hull, piercing light on the waves, briny stink of the air. I know the future, my future. Grim and inevitable, I have withstood it once I shall withstand it again. But no embrace of crushing cold this time. The rather, I feel I could dissolve into a million particles, turn into dust turn into light. And I have spared her the sight of it. Spared her of more than that, surely they must be pursuing me now. Dull drum of the oar hitting the boat's side at the finish of a stroke. Surf seething against the rocks. Precision of observation now, the exact shape of a wave, the creak of my boots as I straighten and bend, my mind accelerating along with everything else.

Escorted by a gull, his tiny pink eye. A gull, if one contemplates, is an astonishing thing. Aloft, balanced on the wind, appetite as ceaseless as curiosity. A bell buoy gongs somewhere behind, a mob of wild roses crowds the bluff, the warm stain of sun on my shoulders, lungs like a bellows brightening the forge inside me. Amazing, all of it, incredible. The gull concludes that I am not something to eat, and veers back toward land.

My eye follows. Kate is small now, trim figure in a yellow shirt on that vivid dock. What has she done why did she not hide? A pack has formed near her, holding a few paces off. They cannot harm her now why would they when it is Jeremiah Rice that they seek? One of the gang points in my direction, they have seen me now they will chase me. She said she needed no rescue yet that is what I have done. This is how I this is how I save her.

Yard by yard the rowboat attains the point, then surpasses it. Rocks obscure the view, my last glimpse. Everything is so fast now, everything, it seems impossible to concentrate, even on the loss oh even on the loss of her. Calm water, little circles, tiny what are they, what is the word, why can I not recall the word it breaks my heart, ah yes
whirlpools
, little whirlpools chase the oars after each stroke. Exquisite, incomparable. A pool of whirl, was there ever anything lovelier. The land falls the harbor falls ever smaller away. Already I feel lighter, light. I bend my back to the task, a stroke a stroke a begin-to-sweat a stroke. A little farther north each time.

CHAPTER 43

The Hounds

(Kate Philo)

W
here did he go? It was as if he vanished. I gave him a few seconds while I collected myself, and he was gone. My ploy had worked.

The first reporter vaulted the pier fence, sprinting up to me. I held out both hands. “Wait!”

Miraculously, he did. Then I saw it was no miracle, he was out of breath. He bent at the waist while the others one by one climbed over the gate. They took the time to hold each other's cameras and notebooks. Politeness among parasites. A gaggle of protesters came charging up behind, a big noise, but somehow the gate stopped them. They waited, not climbing over.

“Gave us a good chase,” the reporter said, panting. “That was fun.”

“Fun?” I scanned the harbor, Jeremiah still not visible. Then I saw him, the little boat in which his enormous life was now confined. He was not even slightly concealed, just rowing right across the center of the harbor.
Go,
I said inside.
Get away and I will hold them here.

The others came along, loud as horses on the boards of the pier. They began yelling my name, raising their hands like so many schoolchildren. I lifted my arms high again, and after a moment they fell into a murmur. One or two of them took pictures.

“Where is Jeremiah Rice?” the first one said.

He had held me, you see, as never before. I felt his life beating against mine. Then he tore something from his coat, he thrust it in my hand.

In the edge of my vision, the very periphery, I could see the little boat making its steady way. I wanted to yell.
Come back. We'll make what we can of every second.

The first reporter pointed out over the water. “Who is that out there?”

I turned as if I had no idea, shielding my brow. “Where?”

My heart was pounding. All was nearly lost. But always in the spectacular moment, my talent is self-possession. I learned the trick long ago and it became a habit of mind: to be calm amid the chaos. My powers of reserve would save him from this mob. Otherwise what would he be returning to, if he could somehow hear my pleas? What besides an angry crush of questions, plus my desperate affections for the few remaining hours? These carrion eaters did not deserve to see Jeremiah die.
If I cannot be with you, I can at least protect you.

“Is that him?” someone asked.

I knew that my moment had come. “It's all true,” I said, which hushed them completely. But I stopped, not adding a word. They waited, with cameras, mikes, notebooks, jostling one another on the pier.

Just then one of the protesters overcame his reluctance and clambered over the gate. The rest of the group poured after him, galloping down the dock. One of them yelled, “Don't let her get away.”

But the TV crews did me an unintended favor, possibly because they didn't want to miss anything I might say or do: not one of them turned to film the gang of shouters running toward me.

Somehow, being ignored chastened them. Halfway down the pier they drew up, as though the leader had pulled on invisible reins. They had no weapons, they had no audience, they called no thunderbolts down from the sky. In fact they had nothing. Suddenly it was clear to me why they had always yelled so loudly: to conceal that they had nothing. Ignored, they were feckless. By the time they reached the scrum of reporters, the protesters were shuffling, almost shy. They arranged themselves in a semicircle on the dock, audience for a play's final scene.

I waited, wanting to run, staying put. Jeremiah needed time to escape their line of sight. I squeezed his button in my fist, but otherwise held still, buying precious seconds.

Eventually one man nudged the fellow beside him. “What did she say, anyway?”

“We thought we had everyone fooled,” I said, a masterpiece of calm. “But apparently not Daniel Dixon.”

I went silent again, stalling. A tendril of my being stretched across that harbor, burning like an inflamed nerve, toward Jeremiah, toward the idea of him at least, as the reality itself moved steadily beyond my grasp.
Come back. This is killing me
.

They fidgeted in place. I could feel their attention dividing. Why was he rowing so conspicuously? He should be hiding. Would they chase that little boat, or stay here? When I realized that they were waiting for me to tell them, to give the signal, I felt a surpassing power. I could save him, though it might destroy me. I could actually save him.

All it would take was a lie, one lie.

Just then a motorcycle buzzed down the footpath. The rider hopped off, dashing toward me, lifting his helmet as he ran. The look on his face was nearly as pleading as Jeremiah's had been only moments before.

Billings. It was all I had lacked, the final push, the last audience member to arrive. I folded my hands at my waist, as matronly as a schoolmarm welcoming third graders to the first day of school.

“It was a hoax,” I said. “All of it.”

Their pause was like the passionate in-breath of a fallen toddler, silent seconds before crying full-voiced for mom. But when they exhaled, the experience was entirely different: they howled and barked like I was some sly fox, full of dodges and feints, yet finally treed at last, as I deserved, while now down at the trunk circled the hounds, ignorant, inevitable, eager to feed.

T
he coverage was merciless. One tabloid ran a photo of my face beneath a giant headline:
PANTS ON FIRE.
I could hardly sue for defamation, when I knew it was true. My refusal to reveal Jeremiah's whereabouts only fanned the flames. Still, I devoured the papers every day, every inch of them, but there was no story about a rowboat being found, much less one with a person in it. I could only speculate about how Jeremiah's end arrived. Was it quiet, a lonely surrender to stillness? Or violent like krill in the lab, one last spasm bursting his heart? Did he lower himself over the side, trusting the ocean to finish the job? Or lie on his back in the roasting sun? My mind considered the possibilities, all of them horrible, until I developed a fantasy: he is not dead, he is still out there somewhere, still rowing.

I heard the late-night TV shows making hay. “The vice president declared his support for zombies and werewolves today,” one host joked, with a picture of the candidate beside Jeremiah. “I guess he's counting on the undead vote, which is strange since he's already way ahead in New Jersey.”

The project's ships were called back into port, ending the global search for hard-ice with a whimper. When the ninth fraud suit was filed, the Lazarus Project closed its offices with no forwarding address. Some pompous graybeard columnist at the
Globe
called for the attorney general to investigate.

The media stayed with the story for weeks, probably because there was a considerable cast involved. Each player needed a turn in the spotlight of hate or revelation.

Thomas, for example. File him in the you-never-know department. It turned out that he was actually T. Beauregard Fillion, heir to the estate of his steel industrialist grandfather. He had basically bankrolled Carthage from start to finish, nearly thirty million dollars over the years. When the project collapsed, so did the investors in reanimation technology that he and Carthage had hoped would turn his donations into an even larger fortune.

“I am proud of what we accomplished,” Thomas said in a long Sunday profile in the
Washington Post
. “It was worth every penny to work with one of the great minds of all time, and to be present when he made scientific history.”

Almost overnight Thomas landed a job with the copycat lab in China. Sanjit Prakore, whom Carthage had fired for spilling his tea, now runs that lab. He, too, was quoted in the
Post
story: “We believe Mr. Fillion will be a tremendous asset to our ongoing work. We expect him to be most helpful.”

Probably so, since he owns the rights to all of the project's intellectual property.

Gerber recovered after two weeks; there was a story about him in the
Globe
. On his way out of Massachusetts General Hospital he paused to make a statement exactly one sentence long: “For nearly all of human history, religious zealots have committed unjustified violence in the name of God.” In the news photo he was giving a goofy thumbs-up, leaning on the arm of his wife. Gerber had a wife; who knew?

A few months later he landed a job with NASA, managing the satellite program that measures climate change at the poles. I felt glad for him, the odd duck. I read about it in the
New York Times
.

Speaking of which, that was also where I learned about Amos Cartwright. A famous chess cheat, yes, discredited and stripped of international standing. But Amos also turned out to be the father of one son, a grandiose compensating narcissist by the name—changed in court when he was eighteen—of Erastus Carthage. And what resourceful investigator spilled those Freudian-flavored beans? Wilson Steele, of course.

Steele wrote a few more stories related to the project, on how Borden couldn't land another job, on the many unpaid debts. He was the one to reveal that Dixon erred in using “Tessie” to prove the judge was a fake. The song, originally about a woman singing to her parakeet, came from a Broadway hit in 1902. Steele went hunting to see if “the authentic Judge Rice” had any living descendants, which caught my interest. But before he found anyone, his new book came out,
Shudder,
about earthquakes, with press junkets, a book tour, the next hot topic.

By then, Carthage could not be hurt by any revelations because he had already hanged himself. He left a letter that said,
We are the opposite of Amos Cartwright.
As Jeremiah would say: Hm. I can't decide which was worse, that he proved himself wrong by dying exactly as his father had, or that his suicide note contained an unintended self-parody by using the royal
we
.

I had not seen Carthage again, after the last time in his office, but people said he never recovered from that debacle of a news conference, reporters shouting accusations while the scientist at the podium froze so pathetically, Borden had to lead him stammering from the room. You might have expected Carthage's tragic suicide to be front-page news, and it truly was tragic, because for all his flaws the man was a genuine genius. Instead I found the story buried deep in the B section, a few inches of text under a blurry photo of his face. Apparently it didn't merit reporting on TV. All that brilliance, all that waste, but it was already old news.

The opposite was true of Gerald T. Walker, as the whole world knows. On the next Halloween, the most popular mask was his face with its trademark toothy grin. The following Tuesday, he swept thirty-one states to become the next president of the United States. While it was a minor matter in Walker's wide-ranging political platform, he championed greater accountability in scientific studies, including an audit of every single federal research grant. Polls showed that a vast majority of the public approved of this policy. Hail to the chief.

Political ambition must be contagious, too. Because T. J. Wade, the star quarterback of self-righteous protests, has announced that he is running for Congress. A few pundits criticized him for launching a campaign so early, with the last election barely over, but Wade has received generous contributions already. His pretty face shows up on TV with amazing frequency, too. The cameras just love him.

If it's love for some, then for others it's money. Daniel Dixon, my own personal space invader, went on to make a fortune. A seven-figure book deal, packed lectures for which he is paid handsomely, a movie coming out next year in which the star playing him is ten years younger and magazine-cover handsome. Oddly enough, Dixon also gave two hundred thousand dollars to a Pennsylvania burn hospital, refusing to explain his reasons, which brought another round of headlines feting him as a hero, truth teller, philanthropist.

As for Hilary in the white beret, who loitered outside the project's offices, I have entertained some suspicions. There's no finding her, of course. I searched on the Internet, the Boston-area phone books. But if tombstones tell a truth that surpasses time, then I'd be willing to bet her last name is Halsey. That would make her the daughter of the daughter of Jeremiah Rice. In which case I send a silent blessing to Hilary Halsey, wherever she may be.

A
nd that leaves me. Old Kate. Carthage said he would ruin me, and I suppose at some level that is what happened: career, home, prospects, all gone. But it was not his doing, no, I did it to myself. Or the world did it, anyway. The first few times I returned to my apartment, the tabloids had staked it out. But they weren't patient, because there's always a new scandal to point a camera at. Soon enough they were only around daytimes. I rented a truck one night, planning to haul out all I could carry. Things went well enough, a long, sweaty effort, until I entered the kitchen to find a single egg sitting on the counter. Nearly three weeks it had sat there. I didn't cry, because I couldn't breathe. Eventually I washed it down the sink, running the water till it spiraled. Then I went back to work because there was nothing else to do: taking down bedding, packing kitchen appliances or winter clothes, sticking it all in a storage shed in Danvers, calling my landlord to say he could keep the rest. When he asked where to send the security deposit, I said he could hold on to that, too. No sense revealing my location.